An ideologue at Justice.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Attorney General John Ashcroft suffers a baffling and dangerous inability to understand the difference between enforcing this nation's laws and imposing his moralistic vision on society.

Five months after he was harshly rebuked by U.S. District Judge Robert E. Jones for blindsiding Oregonians with a directive targeting the state's physician-assisted suicide law, Ashcroft stubbornly decided this week to renew his assault on the state's landmark legislation.

Using the same flawed arguments that lower courts already have rejected, Ashcroft asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to lift Jones' April ruling blocking the attorney general from sanctioning and prosecuting physicians who prescribe lethal doses of medication under the Oregon measure.

With a global network of terrorists intent on bringing devastation to this country and U.S. corporations imploding with corruption, one might think Ashcroft would have higher priorities than persisting in this arrogant overreach of federal authority. But the attorney general has a distorted sense of proportion in this aspect of his performance as the nation's chief law enforcement officer.

Now the state of Oregon and the Department of Justice will clash in court once again over the issue of physician-assisted suicide. Once again Ashcroft will attempt to wield a federal law designed to control illicit drugs into a blunt weapon he can use to clobber the twice-stated will of Oregon voters that lethal drugs be available to terminally ill patients under closely regulated conditions.

A quick review of the brief but troubled history of Oregon's Death With Dignity Act may be helpful. Oregon voters approved the law by a narrow margin in 1994 and reaffirmed it by a 60-40 margin in 1997, drawing the holy wrath of national conservative religious groups, right-to-life organization and kindred political spirits such as Ashcroft.

Conservative hard-liners in Congress made several futile attempts to scuttle the law, and then passed the torch to Ashcroft, formerly one of their own in the Senate. Ashcroft's heavy-handed approach was to reverse a decision made by his predecessor, Janet Reno, by declaring that the federal Controlled Substance Act could be used to regulate medical practice and to punish Oregon physicians who prescribed lethal drugs for terminally ill patients.

In doing so, Ashcroft showed himself to be utterly indifferent to states' rights, traditionally sacred ground for conservatives. It mattered not a whit to him that the regulation of health care and medical practices have long been regarded as the responsibility of individual states, and not subject to the arbitrary whims of a meddlesome attorney general.

Oregon's law has provided a compassionate, tightly regulated example of how one state has responded to the wishes of residents who are terminally ill. Since the law took effect in 1998, 91 terminally ill Oregonians have chosen - deliberately and with dignity - to end their lives. All of them followed the state's strict guidelines, which require that two doctors confirm that the patient has less than six months to live and is mentally competent.

There have been no horror stories, no Kevorkian nightmares, no stampede of tormented souls eager to commit illicit suicide. The law has worked.

It now appears that Ashcroft intends to carry his quest to the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently, the attorney general wasn't paying attention when a fellow conservative, Justice Antonin Scalia, addressed the issue of assisted suicide in a speech earlier this year during his visit to Lewis & Clark Law College. Scalia made it clear he believes the law should not become part of a constitutional battle because the issue is one of states' rights. In other words, Oregonians - and not the attorney general - should decide whether the terminally ill have the right to take their own lives.

After Scalia's comment, a woman in the audience called out, "We did that twice." The justice offered a succinct response - one that Ashcroft would do well to ponder before proceeding further with his ill-fated appeal: "That's fine," Scalia said. "You don't hear me complaining about Oregon's law."